06 November 2008

Accelerometer Related Problems On
Nokia N96, Nokia N85 and Nokia E66 Explained!

The motion based technology is undoubtedly one of the most attractive areas for S60 users. Although officially supported only by the Nokia 5500 Sport, developers have managed to find resources that enable them to use the "hidden" accelerometer sensors on other accelerometer equipped devices like Nokia N95 or Nokia N82 and SF download section is full of more or less usefully accelerometer based applications and cool motion controlled games.

The incompatibility of the latest Nokia S60 device with an older accelerometer based applications and disability to use all these applications and games is probably the most annoying technical issues that "early adopters" complaining about!

Due the code break and changed sensor set of APIs, Nokia N96, Nokia N85 as well as Nokia E66 are not compatible with motion based software and if you one of those who still hope that Nokia will release some kind of patch or that it will be fixed with the next firmware update I am afraid that I’ll disappoint you!?

You see, yesterday I came across great article written by Dr. Jukka Silvennoinen who is also known as symbianyucca which gives an overview of the new S60 Sensor Framework, explains how it should be used, and also provides an example application - all you need to get started in using this new set of APIs.

The S60 5th Edition release introduces a platform-level Sensor Framework. This new standardised set of APIs allows developers to write sensor-aware code that can be run on all S60 devices and utilises the sensors that the manufacturers have provided on them. No more fighting to identify "secret" APIs and magic UID values or switching between this vendor's API and the totally incompatible API of the other vendors!

The S60 Sensor Framework was introduced in S60 5th Edition, but is also backported to S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 for some mobile devices, as well as the Nokia E66 device, which is an S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 device with sensor APIs based on the S60 Sensor Framework.

Note that the old sensor API plug-ins are not compatible with the S60 Sensor Framework. In addition, applications created with Sensor FW do not work in S60 3rd Edition, FP1 devices other than the Nokia E66 mobile device. If you wish to provide just one installation file, you can pack the sensor API parts into an ECom plug-in, build one file with the S60 5th Edition SDK and another with the S60 3rd Edition MR SDK, and then load the correct one during runtime.

In simple words there is no way to get these older applications to work and the only way is to rewrite the code and add support for the new S60 Sensor Framework. As far as I know only Marble Maze game is ported and supports the new framewoprk at the moment and I just hope that after this article more developers will try to extend their applications with new Sensor Framework or maybe release the special version for the FP2 and upcoming 5th ed devices!

I’ll personally point developers from SF dev team to look for the solution and the eaiset way to update their accelerometer based applications and for all other here is the link to Jukka’s article which explains this problem in details.